Columbia University in New York City recently launched the Black Professors Study (BPS), an initiative to build the first integrated epidemiological, governance, and legal dataset on Black faculty in the United States.
Through a combination of rigorous population health research methods and policy and legal analysis, BPS is designed to generate actionable evidence for university leaders, policymakers, legal stakeholders, and public health decision-makers seeking to strengthen faculty equity, institutional accountability, academic governance, as well as inform population health strategy.
BPS will begin at Columbia University with a 75-participant pilot study. It will then expand to include 1,000 Black faculty across diverse U.S. higher eduction institutions, using stratified random sampling to ensure a representative sample across key dimensions, including institutional type, faculty rank, tenure status, and disciplinary field.
“BPS is built to support institutional redesign. The initiative applies population health methods to examine how institutional and legal structures shape the health and career trajectories of Black faculty, ” said Dustin T. Duncan, principal investigator and associate dean for health equity research at Columbia University. “We are developing a dataset that can inform how universities govern, policies function in practice, and the law (including court decisions) shapes the lived realities and health of Black faculty.”
